Arduino to Nintendo DS interface

[Hounjini] was poking around at the Game Boy Advanced bus of his Nintendo DS lite and figured out how to use it to connect an Arduino to the DS. For testing he’s soldered an IDC plug to the cartridge cover pin interface but this only requires four connections. The Arduino can both send and receive data from the DS lite as shown in the example videos after the break. The data access is made possible by making the Arduino look like a controller that the DS is happy to talk to.

Really awesome. Now it will be easy to interface the DS with hardware like GPS units and accelerometers and other sensors as well as robots and other machines using all the open source simplicity of the Arduino.

Nifty. By an odd coincidence, I’d been dabbling in something very similar lately, though using Microchip PIC rather than Arduino.

For the slightly baffled, the value here is that a cheap external microcontroller adds a lot of I/O capabilities: A/D converters, SPI and I2C buses, etc., while the DS has some decent compute power and A/V capabilities that are almost comically simple to program. Pairing the two together can, in some cases, be easier (and sometimes actually cheaper) than building up the same features atop various 32-bit microcontroller kits.

@Nemo, it’s always been easy to interface to DS, i’ve been using a GPS connected to my gameboy SP for years, everything you want is there, Backlit lcd, buttons for control and a multi protocol serial bus on the back

@gibbon: Some cases, yeah. I happened to be using an R4 cart (filling Slot 1) for homebrew code, though of course the situation would be reversed with a Slot 2 homebrew solution. I rather like keeping Slot 2 open though…many more data lines that are easily corrupted to other uses.

hi, my name is luke and i want to make a remote control car with a pan/tilt camera on it, i can make it fine but i would like to be able to controll it from my ds/iphone/laptop but have absoulutely no coding experiance. i was thinking maby using an arduino and a wifi chip but dont no how i would program my ds/iphone/laptop. if anybody knows any good websites or videos that would help i would be very greatful. thanks luke (13) :) e-mail: ljthevj@googlemail.co.uk

Strange this post is totaly unrelated to what I was searching google for, but it was listed on the first page. I guess your doing something right if Google likes you enough to put you on the first page of a non related search. :)

Looking into NDS hardware interface via Slot-2 myself. Can someone point me to some documentation? Specifically how to read/write from the bus from libnds. Presumably I just need to find the correct address, yes?